Saturday, November 04, 2017
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As shown in a PowerPoint presentation, YouGov and Victim-of-Communism-Memorial-Foundation have surveyed over 2,000 millennials. 45% would prefer a "socialist country" while only 42% would prefer a capitalist country. When the system is called "communism", the support drops to 7%, much like for "fascism". A major motivation seems to be that the "capitalist economy works against them".

The poll shows lots of other troubling things, ignorance about most things – over 60% have never heard of Maduro, for example – but it's far from the first one of its kind (see similar results from February 2016, for example) and the U.S. is far from the only country spoiled by this mental disease selectively targeting the youth.

There are lots of things that should be said and questions that should be asked. First, where does it come from? Is it a spontaneous trend that this young generation has invented by itself?

I think that the answer is a resounding No. The generation of millennials has been almost completely brainwashed and pushed towards these beliefs. Their degree of independent thinking – and even desires for any rebellion – is basically zero. Instead, at schools, they have just heard lots of things about safe spaces, discrimination, evils of inequality, global warming, and hundreds of other disgusting things, far left propaganda, and bogus threats mostly invented by the generation of baby boomers – and the millennials are simply parroting it.

When they hear about all the things that are said to cripple or threaten the world, of course they end up with a simple solution: If there is some big government and if the human freedoms are suppressed, can't we save the world? Can't we simply agree to name a government that will make everyone equal, that will make all 26 genders equal, that will turn the whole country or the world into a safe space, that will ban the CO2 emissions, and so on? They're just making a trivial logical step from the "progressive" garbage fed down to their throat to socialism that logically follows from all this garbage.

I only know an extremely tiny number of intelligent youth that have realized that all this stuff is a pile of lies, propaganda for their stupid contemporaries. And I know no millennials who have broken the mouth of outrageous liars such as the global warming alarmists so that the latter wouldn't talk again – and that's exactly what should be happening everywhere if at least some of the millennials had the intelligence, decency, as well as the balls.

So no, it's not their own conclusion. They have been indoctrinated. They have become a herd of stupid sheep.

Second, do they actually have a reason? Is it right that capitalism is working against them? Yes, at least in the short run, it is. But this fact isn't just an intrinsic property of capitalism. It's a combined property of capitalism and themselves. It depends on themselves. Capitalism works against many of them because they're doing something wrong. And they're doing something wrong often because they have been trained to do it wrong. Not just something. Needless to say, the millennials enjoy lots of wealth from the wealthy society and their wealthy parents and almost all this wealth was created by capitalism. If they want to imagine what the life in socialism looks like, they should subtract almost all the things they have ever received from their country, from their parents etc. because those things wouldn't exist – or would be smaller by one order or many orders of magnitude – if socialism replaced capitalism.

Third, why is it "socialism" that is OK while "communism" remains a marginal direction? I suppose that they imagine communism to be "something like socialism plus the killing of millions of people". But that's not really the key to understand the difference between the two words. Socialism is the system one can actually build while communism is some unsustainable utopia that is being promised by those who keep communism.

The regime that existed in the Soviet bloc – and the Soviet Union – is generally called "communism" in the West today. It was led by parties that called themselves "communist parties" so it makes sense. But internally, we had to call the system "socialism". We were "socialist countries". That regime, socialism, was promised to be a stage away from capitalism towards an even better system, communism, a moneyless society where you do whatever you want to do and you take whatever you want to take. The details were never clarified because everyone with the IQ above 80 must have understood it was absolute nonsense. People can't take "everything they want" without any compensation because that would unavoidably result in shortages of most things – all the things that cost something in a different regime because the supply just isn't unlimited and the demand may grow much higher. And there are always such things – although the identity of these things whose consumption needs to be regulated (either by nonzero prices or by some rationing) is changing with time.

So the very fact that they rate "socialism" as so much better than "communism" is a result of their having been brainwashed by some very cheap left-wing promises.

Fourth, will this trend really lead to the end of capitalism, democracy, and individual freedoms, as America's electorate will be drifting in the direction with this pro-socialist, anti-freedom majority? I still hope it won't. There are at least three possible scenarios that may stop it, namely:

the voting rights will be restricted or weighted, millennials may be labeled too young or too poor according to some modified rules to have a voting right, or a sufficiently strong voting right

the millennials will get more reasonable once they get older and more experienced

the millennials will be a bad anomaly and the generation of kids born around 2010 is already going to be pro-capitalist again

The first possibility looks like a controversial change of policies. Democratic elections represent a simple, well-defined system to assign power to the voters. But yes, since my teenage years, I have been repeatedly attracted by the idea that this system is deeply suboptimal and that it's really wrong for everyone (above a threshold of age) to have the same voting right.

I always imagine the elections to be a "civil war done cleverly". In a civil war, more skillful, more motivated, more wealthy – and other adjectives – people would have a greater influence on the results of the civil war. And that's why we may want something like that in the elections, too. Well, brute force isn't the optimum recipe for progress today so we don't really want the total muscle power to determine voting rights. But other characteristics may have good reasons to influence how much your vote matters.

For example, you may have \(N\) votes where \(N\) is the rounded number of thousands of dollars you paid on taxes in the previous year or several years. Or the logarithm of that number. Or something like that. Why not? I do find it natural that when a millennial is economically dependent on someone else, he or she could be dependent politically, too. Maybe some adjustments could be done for students who may deserve to vote, anyway.

I am sure all such proposals are potentially controversial but there should be freedom to discuss them – the equality of votes shouldn't be a holy cow, a dogma that can't be questioned. Lots of democracies – like those in the ancient Greek city states – only included a segment of the population and those systems worked very well (better than the current Greece, for example). In the proposals above, I have deliberately avoided a discussion on stronger votes for the college-educated people or PhDs especially because way too many degrees are being given to absolute morons (like everyone in the gender studies departments) and often for their conformity, not for their intellectual talent or work. If the schools became mostly meritocratic again, it could make sense to establish a voting right that depends on the education again.

The second optimistic scenario is that they're just inexperienced and when they start to do something useful etc., a big portion of them will figure out that they have been idiots and capitalism is needed or better than socialism. It's been said that if you're young and right-wing, you don't have any heart; and if you're old and left-wing, you don't have any brain (at least that's my version of that proverb). Yes, I can imagine that it will work. The schools are bubbles shielded from the real world – or safe spaces, if you wish – and one can learn some basics of the real world as long as one gets from the bubble.

My third optimistic point talks about the next generation – kids who are below 10 years old now. They're being brainwashed at schools intensely, too. But despite that continued and perhaps even more intense brainwashing, my feeling is that this generation is much more freedom-loving. Doesn't anyone have a similar impression? I think that the kids already feel that they're being constrained too much, the things fed to them are too self-evidently nonsensical, and they're annoyed by the personality of their older, millennial, siblings and their young, millennial, parents. So the millennials who prefer socialism may remain an isolated fluke, a decade in the demographic pie chart, and all the other age groups will remain reasonable.

Well, it's still totally possible that none of the optimistic scenarios will work. In that case, America and other countries will probably switch to some new age of socialism that will be led by the likes of Bernie Sanders and that won't be too different from what the Soviet bloc has experienced before 1989. I sincerely hope that this transformation won't ever be global – that there will always be some countries where things are alright. One of the reasons why I find "globalism" so dangerous is that in combination with the contagious memes that want to destroy essential attributes of the civilized society, there is a risk that these attributes may be liquidated globally and therefore basically eternally.

It's important for the nations and regions to preserve some of their local characteristics because if and when America and Western Europe switches to some socialism or a similar failed system imposed by the brain-dead millennials from the survey, there will be other regions of the world – perhaps previously less developed regions of the world – that will evolve according to healthier rules and that will get ahead and ultimately defeat the new rotten socialist bloc.

We may be in the epoch of the "pole reversal" in which the West is becoming the East and the East is becoming the West, roughly speaking. This transitional epoch is somewhat confusing because lots of the far left people in the geographic West are trying to promote the new socialist values – while they are using their wealth as a tool or leverage. It's ironic because this wealth was created basically exactly by the aspects of the social arrangement that they fight against: freedom, capitalism, inequality, local governments beating the centralized ones but also free emissions of CO2 and so on. So these new leftists may feel strong exactly for the reasons that should normally make them weak. But this transitional epoch can't last for too long. If America became socialist, in "less than a century", to be certain enough, it would be surpassed by those countries that remained capitalist.

Similar frustrating polls always remind me how special your humble correspondent and a very small number of people who were actually behind the active transition from communism to capitalism were. When the Velvet Revolution started and tens or hundreds of thousands of people began to attend daily rallies, demanding the end of communism, I was actually surprised. Where did all these people emerge? I have previously met a tiny number of people who would be willing to endorse such pro-capitalist positions. How could over a million of Czechoslovak people accumulate at a Prague-Letná rally in November 1989?

Of course, most of these people were just "careful" before the revolution started. They were opportunists, and so on. On the other hand, the number of participants of the Velvet Revolution events was significantly overinflated because many people wanted to catch the new momentum, expecting similar advantages from their alignment with democracy as they had previously expected from their alignment with communism. Also, many participants of the events could have been absolutely confused and they came there because they expected the Velvet Revolution to create an even more communist communism!

At any rate, in the following years, especially when the 1990s were over, I realized that the number of people who actually understood the important principles and wanted freedom and capitalism, along with related things, was tiny again – about as tiny as it seemed before the Velvet Revolution. A much larger number of people tends to get excited about the dirtiest and most idiotic populist slogans, hatred towards "all the powerful people" or "all the banks" or just any group of people "who have too much freedom" and therefore must "obviously be abusing it", and so on. It's sad but I think that most of my nation actually dislikes freedom, short periods when it looked that a majority liked freedom were anomalies and illusions, and this pessimistic conclusion is true not only for Czechia but also for the U.S. and most of the Western nations.

Among those who were students in 1989, there have been some of us who have actually fought for some things that were valuable and we could independently understand the value. The millennials have nothing of the sort. They're a completely brainwashed generation, like the masses in Orwell's 1984. They don't stand for anything, except for the things they are told to stand for. None of them really rebel against the garbage that is served to them in a huge fraction of the classes at school. Instead, they elaborated upon this garbage.

So while the millennials are the apparent main target of this blog post, I do believe that it's mainly the baby boomers who deserve to be criticized – the generation that was deluded at Berkeley of the 1960s, that remained largely mentally defective even when it got older, and that has screwed another generation that is younger by some 50 years.